Brent Caswell has posted an outline of improvements he would make to the iPhone lock screen to improve its usefulness. He discusses three points:

1. Lockscreen Cards (see image at the right)
2. Grabber
3. Notifications

His article is filled with some great ideas, and is packed full of images to help aid in understanding his ideas.

Google updated their Gmail app for the iPad and iPhone to 2.0. From the official blog post:

With version 2.0 of the app, you’ll get a totally new look and feel, plus a bunch of improvements like profile pictures in messages, numerous new animations from swivels to transitions and infinite scrolling in the message lists.

The app also supports multiple accounts and much more. Head on over to the blog or App Store to see the changes.

While some people online stop at overall market share when comparing products, I am more concerned with their usage in the real world. I decided to look at sales numbers for Android and iOS devices in correlation with both their online market share and Black Friday sales numbers to see how they stacked up. What I found was rather interesting.

From GigaOm:

Few of us who were in this business that day — June 29th, 2007 — will forget the sense of anticipation and history that accompanied the countdown to the release of the iPhone. There was certainly a lot of silly hype, and a lot of bemused condescension from mobile companies such as Palm (now dead) and RIM (which might as well be). But the difference between the launch of the original iPhone and just about every other tech event before or since was the degree to which average people realized just how much this new product would change their lives.

Jump over to GigaOm and give it a read. The post links to other stories about the iPhone’s impact on the industry and how it pushed Apple to the top of the tech world.

Apple released a statement indicating that it stopped using Carrier IQ in most of its devices with the release of iOS 5, and that they “will remove it completely in a future software update.” Apple’s statement follows:

“We stopped supporting Carrier IQ with iOS 5 in most of our products and will remove it completely in a future software update. With any diagnostic data sent to Apple, customers must actively opt-in to share this information, and if they do, the data is sent in an anonymous and encrypted form and does not include any personal information. We never recorded keystrokes, messages or any other personal information for diagnostic data and have no plans to ever do so.”

[Via AllThingsD]